Music Credit: “In the Dome of the Forest,” written and performed by The Kruger Brothers, from the cd The Suite: Volume 1

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Jennifer Cole: We actually, rather than sort of do a location study, which would say, "We're going to put art here," we decided not to do that, and we decided to sort of say: “What do we want to value about this community in public art, and how can we hold that up.” And so we wanted more local artists to be able to do that work. We wanted our local artists to be hired in other cities. So we wanted Nashville to be known as a world-class place for public artists. We wanted more neighborhoods to feel like they had public art that told their stories so that at the end of the day every Nashvillian could and should see something in their public gallery.

Jo Reed: That’s Jennifer Cole Executive Director of the Metro Nashville Arts Commission. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts; I’m Josephine Reed. Chances are when you think of Nashville, you think of music, and you’d be right. Nashville is known throughout the world as a vibrant music center---a mecca for musicians and music-loving tourists. But Nashville casts a much wider artistic net and people in creative fields from fashion to dance to painting call Nashville home. In fact, Nashville has emerged as a global arts powerhouse and ranks consistently in the top 4 arts and culture markets in the U.S. There’s much art to enjoy in Nashville, but what is strikingly clear both to residents and the casual visitor is the city’s commitment to public art. Public art can be found all over the city, on the street, at bus stops, in libraries, or in the lobbies of health centers. The result is the city as a gallery—fun and alive: full of visual as well as musical delights. Overseeing the public art program and working with the artists vital to its success is the Metro Public Arts Commission or Metro Arts. Metro Arts is the Arts and Cultural Division of the City of Nashville. It’s mission is to enhance the lives of Nashvillians and build community through the arts. Jennifer Cole is its Executive Director. I stopped by her office during a trip to Nashville, and we had a far-reaching conversation about the ways Metro Arts helps create a fertile place for the arts and artists to thrive…starting with its place in the city government.

Jennifer Cole: I work for the mayor <laughs>, and I'm just like the Parks Department or the Library Department, and it's our job to think about how Nashvillians experience culture and arts in their daily life.

Jo Reed: Obviously Nashville is doing quite well with this because…

Jennifer Cole: Thank you

Jo Reed: You were the second most artistic city in the country.

Jennifer Cole: Yeah, we were. <laughs> It's pretty exciting, actually.

Jo Reed: It is exciting. It takes maybe an hour of walking-- just walking down the street to completely understand how that is true.

Jennifer Cole: That's true. I mean, we are very lucky as a city for-- our city is about 680 thousand people and growing by the day, and so we're a midsized city, but of that, a lot of the people who live here work somehow in the arts. We have the largest concentrator of songwriters in the world <laughs> who live here. We have a lot of people who work for the for-profit music industry in one way, shape or form. That kind of serves as a magnet for other creative professions.

Jo Reed: That's what I was going to ask you, yeah.

Jennifer Cole: So you have a lot of visual artists who live here. We have a very vibrant and growing fashion industry. So we just-- we have a lot of sort of other arts things that happen here, kind of anchored by and kind of serving as a magnet from the music industry.

Jo Reed: As director of Metro Arts, how do you think about not just sustaining the creative people who are here, but also allowing them to grow?

Jennifer Cole: No, I think that's really important. We have to ask ourselves constantly both of those questions. And so, I mean, the question we work on with our staff is: What are the conditions that have to exist in our community for an artist or a creator, whether it's a musician or a glassblower or a songwriter or a dancer, to be able to thrive? And if you ask yourself those condition questions, they're actually not that different than the conditions that you or I need, <laughs> even if we're not creative.

Jo Reed: Exactly.

Jennifer Cole: So, we end up working a lot on things like wages. So how are artists paid? Are we advocating for artists to be paid good wages? Are we advocating for housing for artists, and for spaces? So art is often-- unlike you or I who can work in a home office, sometimes artists have different requirements for their home offices than the rest of us do. If you're a musician, you have to have a soundproof one. <laughs> If you are a potter, you might have some health and safety issues. And so thinking about how we advocate for artists to have access to those kind of creative spaces. The other thing is we're a very growing community, so how are artists living in neighborhoods? How are they part of their neighborhood associations? How are they part of civic life? So we always are asking ourselves those condition questions, and it means that as an arts commission our staff are not just financially supporting organizations and artists, we're also asking those kind of bigger questions about the life of a community and asking kind of where artists fit in those spaces.

Jo Reed: I would think, because housing is-- a community that doesn't have affordable housing isn't a community.

Jennifer Cole: Correct. No. That's right. And the other thing within that it's often helpful for artists to be part of that conversation because when you hear the word "artist," people often think it's a solo, it's one person. But I have to remind people; artists have children, they have pets, they have elderly relatives-- like an artist has some of the same needs. We can't just build one-bedroom apartments and affordable artist housing and think that's going to fix the issue. We need a whole different kind of series of products for artists because they want to put their kids in good schools, they have elderly relatives who live with them. So we can't just build all affordable housing stock with one-bedroom apartments and check a box and sort of think that's done. It means we have to look at the neighborhood situations all over our county, and we serve a very large county of urban, dense, and then more rural kind of communities. What does affordability look like in all of those places? And so how can artists, over the life and arc of their career, continue to live in this place? Nashville became a mecca for artists in the 1920s and '30s and has continued to grow. We have to continue to sort of forecast what that looks like, and that means making sure all of our different kinds of neighborhoods have that kind of affordability thread to them.

Jo Reed: How many-- of the many artists who live here, how many are local, who come from the community, and how many look at Nashville as a mecca and a place that's welcoming to artists and come here and then become Nashvillians?

Jennifer Cole: Oh, that's a good question. I don't know that I have hard data on that recent transplant thing. <laughs> I will tell you that on average we know in the county alone we have between 40 and 50 thousand people who work directly in the creative industries, and that's 6 percent of our total population, and then we have another population who work in cultural tourism, so sort of supporting the tourist-based economy, which is largely anchored in our music and artistic culture. So a good 23 percent of the total population in the county is either directly working in the arts <laughs> or indirectly supporting our cultural tourism, and I think that's pretty big. So I will tell you that we are growing-- about 80 people a week are moving here, and that's not just artists, but we're absorbing 80 to 100 new people, new residents to Nashville, a week. I was just talking to someone else about the growth projection is at least a quarter million people in the next 10 to 15 years moving here. A lot of them are moving from bigger coastal cities. Technology has allowed people who may have been working as an artist in L.A. or New York to now come here and kind of think that this is a viable place because technology allows us to do things we maybe couldn't do. And one of the things I'm excited about for Nashville is that-- to continue to make this an affordable place for artists but also to bring a diversity of artists and their disciplines here. Music is always going to be a magnet, but I think more and more it's all arts are flourishing here.

Jo Reed: I'm curious about the way artists function within community, and I know Metro Arts is very interested in that as well. And to see artists as part of the community and creating art with that community in mind is something that both roots the artist in the community but also makes the community I think a more cohesive place.

Jennifer Cole: And that's definitely one of the orientations that we have tried to take and to really work on as an organization in the last five or six years is a huge lever that we have is resources. So we are the largest investor in the arts-- financial investor in the arts in the county. We're the main perpetuator of public art in the county <laughs>, and so it's really important for us from a resource standpoint to support artists who work with the community, not just come in and go out of a community. And so I think we've tried to take that mindset in everything that we do, and just two examples. So the Endowment has been really integral in helping us reimagine how we train local artists to work in the community context. Because we're Nashville and we're not L.A. or New York, we don't have a lot of indigenous public artists, people who take that practice and know how to do art in the public realm. It's not something that's actually taught in art school often. <laughs> And so-- and that takes a couple different competencies. It takes you understanding how to work in a neighborhood, how to take feedback, how to maybe alter your artistic vision based on what a neighborhood says, listen to histories-- lots of histories, numerous histories-- within a community and to then have that influence your artistic vision, and it also means working on the kind of technical side of site locations that are owned by the city that have all kinds of regulations around them. And not every artist knows how to do that. Many artists are not taught how to do that in school, and so we've developed, a learning lab program funding from the Endowment-- that trains local artists on how to work in that intersection between community and civic life, and it's great. I mean, we're finding many, many artists want to do that with their practice, but haven't learned how to do that, and so teaching artists how to listen to community, how to have cultural competency, how to navigate community meetings, which are hard <laughs>--

Jo Reed: As anyone who has ever sat in one.

Jennifer Cole: Right. And particularly in a community that's changing so fast and absorbing so many new people, when you say, "This is my neighborhood," you might be talking to a person who moved there last week or a person who's lived there for 50 years. That is true. It is their neighborhood, and that conversation is navigating. And that's a really important thing that we try to sort of empower artists to do that. And the other thing is, with our cultural agencies-- so we have cultural organizations that have been working in this community since 1920, and we have cultural agencies who are emerging to serve the community that we are becoming. And so it's really important for us to, through our grant-based funding, to ask hard questions of those organizations as to sort of: How are they working with communities? Who are they listening to? Who are their partners? How do they know that the work that they're producing is authentic to those communities? And so those are questions that we've now started asking in our grant-making process, is for new or very longstanding organizations to articulate how they're really listening to communities-- not just going and doing a program here or a program there, but listening to and incorporating various narratives into their work.

Jo Reed: It's interesting, because it works against so many myths around artists.

Jennifer Cole: Yes.

Jo Reed: You know, the lone, struggling artist who is off on his or her-- mostly his, let's face it-- own. And that definition is changing, but at the same time, myths are myths because they're powerful. <laughs>

Jennifer Cole: No, that's right. I mean, and that lone struggling artist is out there, and there are people that that is their chosen place, and that's okay, and we want to support those folks too. We hear increasingly, particularly from artists of color, from local artists who maybe have not been in economies in bigger communities, right? That they want to learn how to practice in their neighborhoods, in their work. It's also how they string their income together because we all know that most artists don't get a weekly paycheck. Most artists earn their income from a freelance perspective. They get paid in fits and spurts. And so it's really important to cultivate a place where they're getting paid in those fits and spurts, <laughs> and those happen in neighborhoods. You know, we feel like we're successful if we can train an artist to listen in a neighborhood, and that artist may or may not get a commission from us, but in learning that competency, they're hired by a local pizzeria to do a mural, or they're hired by a local school to do a community project. Their employment is going to come from the neighborhood, so being relevant in that neighborhood is really important, from a livelihood standpoint as well as from a community livability standpoint.

Jo Reed: I'd like to have you talk just a little bit about the similarities and distinctions between public art and street art.

Jennifer Cole: Yeah. Well, that's good. <laughs> So in our nomenclature, in our definition, public art in our world is art that is paid for by the public, and in the public realm. Right, so in our city, we have an ordinance that allows us to put some bond-based financing into financing public art. So all public art is in the public realm. All street art is also in the public realm, but not all street art is financed by the public. <laughs> That's the distinction that I would draw. And in fact, most street art is actually privately financed or it's artist--

Jo Reed: Or not financed.

Jennifer Cole: Or not financed at all. It's artist-initiated. So that's the kind of overlapping world. Like all public art is public but not all street art is public art. I think it's interesting because people assume that we have oversight over all of that, which we don't. So it goes back to those conditions. We have a flourishing street art culture here because we've created conditions that neighborhoods value art and neighborhoods value artists, which means more and more artists are doing street art, and they're getting paid for it. <laughs> We consider that a checkbox of success, even though we've had very little directly to do with all the incredible mural art that's happening.

Jo Reed: That’s what’s so amazing about Nashville. Is that you have fabulous public art.

Jennifer Cole: It’s great.

Jo Reed: But at the same time, you have wonderful street art. These two things have to be related!

Jennifer Cole: Yeah! Really it’s important to think about different parts of an arts ecology and kind of tie them together.

Jo Reed: Now, good. I am glad you used the term "arts ecology", a term we hear often, but it can be a little loosey-goosey about what it means.

Jennifer Cole: Sure. Right. So I mean, think about what it means to have everyday access to the arts or to have-- if you live in a community, whether it's rural or suburban or urban, think about what it takes for you to have access to a play or for you to have access to a museum or for you to have access to music, live music, in your community. There’s a public ecology, and then there's a private sector ecology, is really within our best interest to work at both levels. I have direct control over the public sector stuff <laughs>, but I don't have direct control over what a local business owner does on their property. But if that local business owner sees five other business owners putting murals up and thinks, "That's a really good idea, I should maybe do that," then we create a condition where they think that's a good opportunity. I mean, I now talk with our zoning administrator and our codes people who kind of help us deal with street art far more than I ever <laughs> used to five years ago. I maybe talked to them once every six months and now it's at least a couple times a week, because the momentum has really happened, and that's great because, at the end of the day, that means more artists are making a living. So, when we say ecology, it takes all of those different parts and pieces, but at the center point it's: How do we support people that are creating, and all the different ways that they are creating in their communities?

Jo Reed: You once described yourself as a translator between artists and people.

Jennifer Cole: Yeah. It’s funny. Art school teaches you to be very good at playing the cello; it teaches you to be very good at oil painting; very good at 3D sculpture. It does not teach you about how to take that discipline and have that discipline exist within the complicated and sometimes messy world of neighborhoods <laughs> and communities, all of whom have those strains and stresses, and so often what we find-- and not just me by my staff-- find ourselves doing is: How do we support that person to do what they have been trained to do as an artisan in an environment that sometimes doesn’t understand how it fits in that neighborhoods. And I think that requires translation. <laughs> Yeah, I sometimes am a U.N. translator. Depending on the meeting I'm in, I can talk housing, or I can talk transit, or I can talk neighborhood issue. I'm very involved in the public school system because both my kids go to public school, but I feel like it's important because many artists have children that are in those systems and that's also where we train the next generation of artists. So understanding those various languages and being able to turn one off and turn on another is honestly a skill set I wish we'd teach more in art school. <laughs> I think-- I wish we'd teach artists how to be successful in their careers, and you actually did a really great report at the Endowment about that, which is really lovely, because it sort of gives tone and texture to what I see every day, which is artists who are very good at their craft but that craft kind of sits outside sometimes of how they have to earn their money, and also how they have to be citizens. So…

Jo Reed: Yeah, exactly. Good neighbors.

Jo Reed: And especially people-- the public art program is so vital here, and public art brings a whole realm of skill sets that they definitely don't teach in art school.

Jennifer Cole: Nope, nope, nope. We have tried very hard to hire local artists into the public art program, and public art is a field that privileges folks who have big studios and big budgets, and it's not often a local artist thing. But half of our-- 55 percent of the commissions we've given in the last five years have been to local or regional artists. But you'd be surprised at the amount of time our staff has to get someone studio insurance or working with engineers, which is not a normal practice one is taught in art school. Help with notary issues or just to pay someone in a city government system is complicated right?

Jo Reed: City ordinances.

Jennifer Cole: City ordinances. We have a floodplain, we're in an earthquake zone. Having to engineer your art for all of those things is not something you're taught in art school <laughs>, and something that is hard, and so I think that we try hard to sort of enable our local artists so they can do that. Because if they can do it here and they can do it successfully with us, then they can-- then Seattle can hire them, then Belgium can hire them, then Paris can hire them, and they can be seen as national and international artist leaders elsewhere.

Jo Reed: For public art, you have a 1 percent set-aside.

Jennifer Cole: We do.

Jo Reed: Just explain a little bit about what that is. I mean, the thumbnail sketch of the 1 percent set-aside.

Jennifer Cole: Sure. Without being too technical-- so, cities pay for infrastructure-- buildings, streets, roads-- generally by issuing bonds, and we have in our city, and many other cities around the country-- and communities, not just cities-- have a 1 percent ordinance, which allows us to set 1 percent of our bond issuance aside for the acquisition of public art. So basically that means when the city issues bonds to build roads, streets, schools, libraries, 1 percent of that gets put into a savings account and we use that money to then do public art installations. That means they have to be permanent, and our ordinance allows us to pool funds. So sometimes they go along with the building. So if we're building a new library, occasionally we will often do a project with that library. But because we're a pretty large geographic county, there are some areas of the county that don't have as much infrastructure spending, it allows us to move some of those funds to do neighborhood projects in those places. We also are lucky in a city-- our mayor has also put money into temporary public art. So we actually have two sources of money for public art. We have the bond, the permanent things, and we have the <laughs>-- we have the non-permanent things-- so temporary exhibitions, installations and things like that.

Jo Reed: In May, there is a new plan for public art in Nashville, and I'm very curious about this because the old plan was doing really, really well. So I'm really excited to know what you're thinking about.

Jennifer Cole: Yeah. Some cities and Philadelphia has had a public art program for more than 60 years. In the world of public art, our plan, our city funding for public art, is actually fairly new. It went into effect in 2000. So we had actually never done a comprehensive county-wide plan, and it felt like, with the growth of the city and the kind of good economic conditions, that it felt like a good time for us to maybe forecast where we wanted to be in 10 or 20 years. And so we actually, rather than sort of do a location study, which would say, were going to put art here. We decided not to do that, and we decided to sort of say: “What do we want the feel of this community to be like? What do we want to value in this community in public art and how can we hold that up?” And so we wanted more local artists to be able to do that work. We wanted our local artists to be hired in other cities. So we wanted Nashville to be known as a world-class place for public artists. We wanted more neighborhoods to feel like they had public art that told their stories and that people could attach to. We felt like public art was a critical component of cultural access so that at the end of the day every Nashvillian could and should see something in their public gallery, right? We sort of see public art as a public gallery. And we wanted public art to continue to help navigate those conditions that we've been talking about-- affordability and employability and things. So our public art plan actually, rather than sort of say, "These are all the places we're going to put public art," says, "These are the types of tools we want to have in place so that more art can be accessible by the general public." So it calls for temporary art funding, more exhibitions. It calls for more residencies in the community than neighborhoods so that artists can live and be embedded in places. <laughs> It calls for more and more civic partnerships with our parks and library system, where we know residents are already spending their time, and we want to have public art in those places where we know more and more residents spend their time. And it also calls for-- to your point earlier about private sector-- it calls for helping build the private sector. How can more companies, more small businesses, be involved in public art, and how can we support them? Not pay for it, but how can we provide them tools and training and assistance so that they can, in the public realm-- some of it's owned by the public <laughs>, by the government, and some of it-- a lot more of it is owned by private citizens and businesses. If we really want to have an ecology that supports public art, there are certain things the government can do, but there's a lot more that private citizens and businesses can do, and so thinking about how we support them in that work is part of that plan.

Jo Reed: Okay, now let’s go ten years down the road, and I want you to put on your predictor hat. How will the arts factor in to the daily lives of the people who live in Nashville, ten years from now?

Jennifer Cole: If we are doing our job well here at Metro Arts, every resident will have a vibrant and creative neighborhood in the neighborhood that they live in, which will allow them access to the arts without a three-block radius of their house. It doesn't mean you're going to have a giant performing arts center displacing you. It just means that you'll be able to experience and participate in the arts in a contextual way in your neighborhood, where it doesn't feel like some people have and some people don't have. Does that make sense? So if we've done our job, in 10 or 15 years, more artists will say that they're earning a viable income <laughs> from their art in this town, <laughs> that they will be able to earn a consistent income to pay for their kids to go to school and to have nice things, right? If we will have done our job, more Nashvillians will participate in the arts more regularly, and that means in their own way. That might mean taking pottery lessons, or that might mean going to a local community theater. It could be paid, it could be unpaid, but that at the end of the day our cultural agencies and our artists will report to us that more residents are coming to them to participate in the arts. So I mean, at the end of the day, if you lived in Nashville for 50 years or you moved here last week, you will not wonder about how your life can be enhanced by the arts. You will-- it will be very obvious to you. That's, to me, success. <laughs>

Jo Reed: That’s wonderful. Jen, thank you so much.

Jennifer Cole: Thank you. <laughs>

Jo Reed: I really appreciate it.

Jennifer Cole: Oh, thank you for this opportunity.

Jo Reed: No, thank you. It was a pleasure.

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That was Jennifer Cole Executive Director of Metro Arts. If you’re going to Nashville, make sure and download the app ExploreNashvilleArt.com – it’s your mobile guide to art in Nashville.

You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter.

For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.